Cindy O’Neal, left, says her friend Nicole Yanick Darrington Clark, 43, right, who is accused of stabbing her daughter and two granddaughters at their Colton apartment, is mentally ill. “It’s a real sickness. That person, that’s not the person I know,” O’Neal said.

She sat next to her attorney and didn’t appear to acknowledge the handful of friends and family sitting in the gallery.

After the images went public, social media posters vilified the 43-year-old Riverside mother and grandmother.

She has pleaded not guilty.

Family and friends, however, remember a time when she was Nicky, the woman who loved to cook, enjoyed singing and loved her children and grandchildren.

“She’s mentally ill,” said longtime friend Cindy O’Neal. “It’s a real sickness. That person, that’s not the person I know.”

Clark — previously identified by police and in records as Nicole Darrington-Clark and Nicole Yanick Clark — was diagnosed as a severe schizophrenic following a violent outburst in 2005 in which she stabbed her then 14-year-old son and threw her 10-year-old daughter from a moving vehicle. In a rare decision, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered to be held at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino for 34 years to life.

Despite strong opposition from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, a jury found Nicole Clark sane in September 2015. She enrolled in a Conditional Release Program, a state outpatient program that provides a treatment plan and supervision, and was doing very well, said her father, Sam Clark, 71, in a phone interview from his Victorville home Friday.

She married Nathan Darrington, a man she met inside the state hospital, and the couple had a boy who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, both Sam Clark and O’Neal said.

“When she was doing good, she was a good person,” Sam Clark said. “She took care of her son, she worked a job … she did things for everybody because he was a special-needs baby. Anyone who can take care of a special-needs baby and work, too, is a special person.”

During a recent conversation with her friend, Clark said she was excited to go to school to study law.

Friends and family say the problems began when she became separated from that treatment, which ultimately led her to stop taking her medication, Sam Clark said. She again began to have erratic thoughts and behaviors, he said.

“She tried to commit suicide,” he said. “She came to me two or three times, ‘Daddy, something is wrong.’ ”

It wasn’t immediately clear why Nicole Clark stopped attending treatment, although her father suggests the program she was attending had shut down.

The state Department of State Hospitals has not closed any of its programs in the past two years, according to the department’s Ken Paglia.

If a program does close, the department will work to help patients transition to another program to ensure continuity of care, Paglia said via email.

An individual may request to leave an outpatient program, according to an email from Ralph Montano of the Department of State Hospitals.

“If the court agrees and the individual is released, state medical treatment and oversight of the individual ends,” Montano said in the email.

Clark went to a psychiatrist “and he gave her medication that made her act more crazy than she was already, so she stopped taking it. That’s when everything started,” Sam Clark said.

She went to Utah three months ago, her father said, and tried to kill herself. She was briefly held in a county hospital, he said.

“She needs to go back to a place where she can realize what’s going on. Because right now the way she is, she doesn’t even know what’s happening. I looked at my daughter on TV (during her arraignment Thursday), and she didn’t even know where she was.”

Friends and family feel the system failed Clark and she ended up falling through the cracks.

Sam Clark said there isn’t sufficient support for those with mental illnesses, saying officials should focus on putting more money into mental health services and institutions instead of building jails for petty thieves.

According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, in 2010, the state spent about $40,000 a year to keep a person incarcerated. A report compiled by Governing magazine shows that for the same year, the state spent about $152 per person for mental health issues.

“The way the system is now … I don’t think that she should have her freedom again,” Sam Clark said Friday. “I love my daughter more than anything, but I don’t want anybody else hurt anymore.”

Sam Clark said he hopes his daughter does not have to face a criminal trial.

“Putting her in jail is not going to help her or anybody else,” he said. “She needs to be in a mental hospital where she can get some help … and ask for God’s forgiveness. Everybody should have that chance.”

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